By Marc S. Sanders
Blanche Dubois emerges from the steam of a New Orleans bus depot. She looks worn and lost, but she once felt confidence in the glamour she evoked in and out of her family’s Mississippi estate called Belle Reve. Now, with the aid of a chivalrous Navy shipman, she’ll board A Streetcar Named Desire to visit her sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski. The estate is no longer owned by the Dubois family, and Blanche has given up being a teacher. Blanche will be staying in the French Quarter ground floor apartment for quite some time, though no one knows how long. Her life is stuffed in a large trunk with some fashionable suitcases in tow, and an infinite variety of colorful storytelling.
Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning play was a smash on Broadway and though it is checkered with, at the time, questionable topics ranging from mental illness to domestic abuse and rape, it was a smash hit on Broadway. Other than Jessica Tandy, the majority of the play’s cast was hired for Elia Kazan’s film adaptation. Marlon Brando, not yet a box office star, is the brutish and sexually appealing Stanley Kowalski, arguably one of his top five best performances. Kim Hunter presumed her role as Stella, the meek wife against Stanley’s hulking build. Karl Malden played Harold “Mitch” Mitchell. Hunter and Malden won Oscars for their performances.
Vivien Leigh was the top billed actor, replacing Tandy, in the Oscar winning role of Blanche. Leigh is working very hard throughout the course of the picture with long winded rants about what became of her teaching career and Belle Reve, along with her tales of conquests with all sorts of men. At times she reaches into her trunk for the guise of a southern genteel lady with enormous amounts of experience behind her.
Stella is concerned with her older sister’s behavior, but tolerant if it brings her comfort. It’s clear that Blanche is not well.
As he tries to uphold his drunken control over Stella while hosting Mitch and the guys for nightly poker games, Stanley is only agitated by Blanche’s intrusion. He sees through all of his sister in law’s stories and is certain, as a husband to Stella, he has earned the right and proper possession of whatever monies and assets were collected from the ownership transfer of Belle Reve.
As the rundown two-bedroom Kowalski apartment is intentionally small and cramped, Kazan’s film often operates like a stage play. There are some editing tricks like weaving echoed voices and triggering sounds to stimulate Blanche’s paranoia, along with a sleepy soundtrack to deliver a quiet, sticky, muggy jazz ambience, normally associated with the Square. Even in the black and white photography of the film, you don’t have to try looking for the perspiration on Stanley and Mitch’s shirts and brows. The heat also works towards Blanche’s moments of delusion.
Early on, I had problems with Vivien Leigh’s portrayal. She’s talking a mile a minute and had I not read Williams’ original play ahead of time I’d be listening to her with no idea of what she’s talking about. I realize that’s the point, however. When Blanche arrives, Stella is as confused because her sister is going off in so many fast-talking directions all at once. Kim Hunter’s Stella is trying to keep up but fails to stay with Blanche.
Even though, his portrayal has been satirized too often (“STELLA!!!!”), Marlon Brando gives one his best performances. He’s a giant on screen with a stylish, messy, short mousse-soaked hairstyle and t-shirts that adhere to his large torso. This performance is unforgettable. Kazan’s set up of the apartment has old junk strewn about the place, but Brando can easily find a prop to vent his frustration or deliver frightening in-your-face anger and tantrums. As patterned mentality so often demonstrates, Brando is very skillful at turning his animalistic behavior into false regret and whiny need for his wife Stella to embrace his hulking mass and stay with him. As long as Stella comes back and holds him, he can carry on with his abuse and dominance. I never joke about Brando’s famous scene. It’s raw and natural. For Stella’s sake, it’s also terribly offensive and inappropriate. Yet, that’s Stanley. Marlon Brando knew that too well.
Elia Kazan had artistic challenges with this film. Religious boards were insisting Warner Bros remove the film from distribution. The studio’s compromise was to edit the film to appeal to organizations and general audiences. To his dismay, Kazan was unable to deliver the Final Cut as he envisioned. At last, however, the film company recanted that order and in the late 1980s. Kazan’s original picture was released as intended.
So interesting to watch Tennessee Williams’ story unfold for everyone to see. As Stanley is a former Marine, I believe Williams was striving to show the never discussed diagnoses of PTSD. Compared to today’s standards, the violence primarily committed by Brando’s character is nothing alarming and yet it builds tension every time he’s on screen. To a movie going public, this is unfamiliar territory.
Kazan deliberately made the set of the apartment smaller as filming persisted. This tactic evoked a cramped and claustrophobic lifestyle for Blanche and Stanley under one roof. Making it smaller and smaller as the making of the movie went on, showed the troubled characters feel more pressured and inhibited, trapped among each other’s poisons. The characters cannot help but live practically on top of each other. The tension amplifies with each passing scene until it all comes to a shocking boil.
Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois are a dangerous cocktail of different abnormalities clashing together with a helpless Stella caught in the middle and a shy, introverted Mitch looking in the wrong direction for a healthy dose of companionship. These characters are very complicated with sudden shifts in mood and behavior. Often, Kazan will have the characters emerge from dark voids into straight up-close frames. One moment characters feel like they’ll pet you. Other times, they look like they’re about to strike. Kazan strategically knows how to use the dark shadows of black and white photography to emote an assortment of personality. It’s amazing, and something much more overt here than on stage or within the script. Even when Blanche takes advantage of a young man who arrives on the Kowalski doorstep, we see the animal instincts of the woman about to pounce on innocent, unsuspecting prey. Since it is often challenging to comprehend Blanche’s actions and rambling dialogue it’s all the more shocking to witness how she takes advantage of the young man when no one else is around.
The palpable discomfort of A Streetcar Named Desire upholds Tennessee Williams’ famous play. Exploring the film in present day, his work defies changes in culture and mutual treatment because people are much more open and less remorseful about their sins. Statutory rapes committed by teachers are reported nearly every month. Alcoholism has never changed since the addiction first occurred long before this was a movie. Here, the disease serves as a fuel to engines of tempers and weaknesses.
Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams knew what buttons to push, resulting in an ending that still feels too hard to accept. During the epilogue of the story, two strangers appear at the Kowalski home. Who could they be and what are their intentions?
For 1952, all of the gratuitous natures of the characters seem extreme and disturbing. Tame compared to any kind of material coming out in 2026, following Presidential administrations where sex is weaponized and psychological research has been researched with viable proof for specific ailments. Kazan’s film with Williams’ script seems pioneering. How many other storytellers were going this far with their projects?
A Streetcar Named Desire will always be a classic passed down to future generations. It’s fair to say that other than the black and white cinematography, very little of the film feels outdated. Sadly, much of what is shown is authentic to details of domestic violence with smashed dishes, broken radios and torn t-shirts.
Tennessee Williams never explores why these people are this way. Instead, he demonstrated that people are this way, and outside stimulants will only exacerbate personal challenges.
A vehicle, such as a city streetcar trolley, of any form or embodiment will deliver a fly in an ointment. People have all kinds of ways to respond thereafter, and some will never be able to find that vehicle to drive them back towards a peaceful salvation. That is the sadness of A Streetcar Named Desire.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 